Hey app, stop using my data plan!

Here we are again another Friday and the development train is rolling again on a new project.

So I managed to wrap up my latest app: UEFA EURO 2012, which got submitted through AppHub a couple of nights ago after using too much time playing around with graphics and stuff that I never ended up using. I think next time it will be a better idea to get a designer to do some proper work on it. Any offers? Please drop me an email. There will be another app in the works pretty soon.

So enough waffle. What have I been focussing on this time. Enough of all the control talk of the past couple of weeks. I started thinking firstly on cutting down on the autorefresh the app does, as I’m not entirely satisfied with the idea of push notifications and the they’ll be there when they feel like it attitude. Just to clarify that, before I get stormed for not using push.

It was a simple fix:

if (DateTime.Now < new DateTime(2012, 06, 13))
{
KickTimer();
}

My other focus was to not use the data connection of the phone until it was needed. As I usually always start an app with dummy data anyway, I had the data in the app ready for testing, which I used to preview the tournament, until it starts. With a simple if, I wouldn’t be calling my livescore service before the Euro 2012 start:

So as you can see, pretty simple fixes, but added value for your users. As they get pre tournament data instantly as it is in the phone and the intelligent refresh only gets activated on the stages that are relevant at the time.
Next step is to store the live updated data in the phone, so it can be used post tournament, similar to the way it is in my Champions League Final app. But that will have to be an update.